“We have a shituation here,” said James, as Ana pulled out wipe after wipe. She managed a small laugh, passing the packet to James. James wiped and cleaned, folding each used cloth into the next, then stuffing the ball into the dirty diaper, expertly. He enjoyed a moment of satisfaction, held back his shoulders at his accomplishment, and then looked at his wife, hovering in the doorframe.
“I’m not sure what to do now,” she said.
“Why don’t you get his bed ready while I give him the bath?”
Ana nodded, and James turned to the boy, lifting him gently into the tub. “Let’s get clean, right? Let’s get clean.” James wiped the washcloth with Ana’s French milled soap, then rubbed it up and down his back.
“Where toys?” asked Finn.
James looked around the bathroom. Stainless steel soap pump. A small vase with a white daisy in it. The uselessness of the room struck him: Two years ago, they had knocked out walls and installed a sitting area in the bathroom. It contained a large black cane chair and a table holding magazines that had never been touched. James sat in the chair only once, the day it arrived, declaring it not uncomfortable.
Under the sink, James discovered an old blue plastic water cup—something of his from a long-ago apartment. With the cup, Finn began to bail the tub back into the tub; dip and pour, dip and pour, while James sang a Jonathan Richman song that had lingered, waiting for use, in the back of his head for twenty-some years: “ ’What do I now hear, hark, hark? Is it really leprechauns, and have they come back to rock ‘n’ roll?” Finn was oblivious to the song—dip and pour—but James kept going, pleased with himself, repeating the chorus: “Ba-doom ba da da da da, da da …” James reached for Ana’s shampoo, also French, with the price tag still on it.
He said to Finn: “Twenty-two dollars? Who pays twenty-two dollars for shampoo?” He made Finn’s foamy hair into a gigantic spike, still chanting. At the end of the song, Finn splashed a gentle sprinkle on James’s face and looked at him expectantly. James reached into the tub and flicked a bit at Finn, and for a moment, it looked like the boy was going to cry; his face gathered, as if preparing to come apart—oh God no, thought James. Oh no. But it suddenly ceased, and Finn laughed, picking up the blue cup, dipping and pouring.
Ana returned with a green fluffy towel that she sniffed before handing it over—verbena. James lifted Finn out, and as he held his gleaming wet body up in the air, Ana saw in her mind’s eye James’s hands slipping, and Finn, falling fast, cracking his head on the bathtub, leaving the white tile veined with blood.
But then Finn was on the bath mat, grinning. Both of them scanned his body for cuts and bruises, markers of what had befallen his family. He was perfectly clear, just as the doctor at the hospital had said. Not a freckle, not a mole. No evidence.
James wrapped him in the towel.
“I’m a burrito!” cried Finn. “Tighter! Like Mama make it!” The words knocked James. He looked into the boy’s face, his little teeth far apart, all of him without mourning. James tightened the towel until Finn resembled a long green onion, blond hair spiking through the top. Finn giggled at his immobility, trying to walk and falling on his back, laughing and laughing.
James scooped him up, carried him to the guest room. Ana had made up the bed with honey-colored linens. It isn’t a child’s room, thought James, dropping the towel on the leather love seat. There was no whimsy anywhere in the house. They didn’t speak of this guest room as a future nursery anymore, though a nursery with a view of the garden had been a selling point, hadn’t it? He was sure it had.
“Help me,” said Ana. James looked at her and realized she meant the bed. Together, they moved it to the wall.
“Watch TV!” cried Finn, jumping on the bed, while James tried to pull a pajama top over his head. Blue, with a monster’s face: “Veddy scary!” The fabric was nubby and worn, another item from Mrs. Bailey’s. James tried not to imagine what horrors had been witnessed by all the foster children who had worn these pajamas.
“No TV. We’ll do a book,” said James, then looked at Ana, who hovered again in the doorframe. “Wait, do we have any books?”
“We left the bus book in the car,” said Ana, watching James expertly stick the diaper, pull on the monster pants.
About the absence of books, James said: “Shit.”
Finn went still. “You say shit,” he whispered.
Ana, roused to James’s defense, said: “You said it, too.”
“I know. You’re right. It’s a bad word,” said James. He turned to Ana: “Can you see if there’s anything for him to read? Maybe a graphic novel or something.”
“I don’t know if Robert Crumb is appropriate,” said Ana, but she headed toward their bedroom and the basket of magazines next to her bedside table.
Finn folded into James’s lap, letting James brush his hair, his face turning sleepy.
“Maybe the cartoons in here?” Ana asked, returning with an old New Yorker that Sarah had lent her months ago. James laughed. Ana sat down on the bed next to James, as if she, too, was awaiting story time. He flipped through the magazine, James asking Finn what animals were in the cartoons, what sounds they made; James telling him stories about vultures and dogs. Both Ana and James were acutely aware of what this looked like from a distance. James pulled up the quilt to Finn’s chin.
Ana placed throw cushions on the floor at the side of the bed, a circumference, like a ring of lye outside a village hut used to keep away the witches. James leaned down, and small hands circled his neck. Ana patted Finn’s leg, his body a tiny bump, lost on the big bed.
“Sing light,” said Finn.
“Leave the light on?” asked James.
“No! Sing it! Sing it!”
Ana raised a single finger to her temple and began to rub, as if it would help her to draw understanding out of her skull.
“Light? A song about light?” she said, feeling like she had walked into a game of charades.
“Yes! Sing it!”
“Can you sing it, Finn?”
“No, Mama sing it,” he said. James and Ana went still, wondering what would happen next. Finn looked at them, waiting.
James said, “I’m sorry, Finn, we don’t know it. Do you want to hear the leprechaun song again?”
Finn considered this, let out a very adult sigh, as if he had expected no less incompetence from these so-called caregivers.
“Okay.”
James sang it again, and Ana looked away. But James wasn’t self-conscious, almost never was he self-conscious, and especially not now, having seen how his song rescued the boy from the edge, pulled him back from the churning waters of sadness. He smiled again, laughed even as James sang the last line: “ ‘They come back to rock ‘n’ roll.’ ”
“Good night,” said Ana, leaving James to do the final kiss and tuck. She found herself in the hallway, with her hand on the wall, closing her eyes.
“Good night,” she heard her husband say.
James was in bed first, looking from his laptop to Ana as she moved through the room in her long white nightgown. She straightened an angled jewelry box, then carefully hooked her belt on a belt rack, her blazer in the section of the closet reserved for blazers.